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For the consumer market, Samsung has long been a dominating force for "combo" drives for as long we've been reviewing optical devices. These drives combine a high speed CD-R/RW drive with a DVD-ROM in a single cost effective, multi-purpose unit. Today we're looking at the Samsung SW-348B. Now this drive actually combines 16X DVD read capability with 48X/24X/48X CD-RW speeds... which really IS amazing, but this doesn't even represent Samsung's cutting edge anymore... just last month they announced their newest combo drive capable of 52X CD-R write speeds - the fastest CD-R write speed in the industry today!

What was the "latest" and "greatest" maybe 2 months ago is still at the forefront of today's technology. Make no mistake, the SW-348B is FAST - you'll see how fast in our benchmarks... but suffice to say for now that some of its performance results blew us away. It seems like Samsung's R&D teams are able to make increasingly fast leaps in combo drive technologies... the fact that just a year ago we were reviewing the earlier Samsung combo drives, those drives were often a step or two behind the fastest single use CD-RW writers... take the SM-308 for instance, it's 8X write, 4X rewrite speed was a far cry from 12X or 16X writers of the time.

Now, the SW-348B has write and rewrite speeds competive with top of the line burners. Better yet the newest 52X combo drive, the SM-352, has the same specs at the absolute highest performance CD writers on the market today. Now that's a very advanced level of development in terms of keeping up with CD-R/RW only drives.

Why Combo?

If you haven't already figured it out, here's a hint: the combo drives will perform the functions of a CD-ROM, a CD-R, CD-RW, and DVD-ROM drive all at a cost that's only marginally higher than a standarlone CD-R/RW drive. Some high powered users may want several drives in their system, but more and more people are jumping on the combo bandwagon - Samsung estimates that they will have 50% of the market share for combo drives by 2004, when the world will see the combo market balloon from a volume of 1.5million (estimate for 2003) to 4million units sold. Just what makes these drives so appealing, and why should you care?

Let's take a look at it from my own perspective. At home I do a fair amount of archiving using my CD-RW drive... and when I view DVD movies I have to rely on a second drive. That's fine because I've invested in both drives already... but when I built my second home system to replace my aging P4 400, I used a combo drive to save on cost. The cost incentive outweighed any minimal advantage there is in having 2 drives for a regular user like myself. Better yet, there's less clutter, and less bother with too many devices in the system. I actually PREFER having fewer devices. If Samsung and other companies hadn't come out with combo drives, I might have had to forego DVD functionality to save a few bucks...